Does VOIP Business Add Up?

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voyce_overipee 12/5/2012 | 3:15:29 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? There are absolutely alarm systems that look for physical connectivity to the home over the phone network. Having worked on OSP issues and having them go off when you have connection problems, it is a big deal. As are the other non-POTS voice line services.

So how does that work? I mean the pots line is essentially terminated at the CO or DLC from an analog + power perspective, right? so what can they check and from what box through what method that doesn't involve the adt box making a call?

How is the alarm vendor even tied into the last mile outside of the house? or are you saying when the local phone company detects an outage they contact the alarm vendor?

I'm curious because i have ADT and i see the adt box inside my house connected to the house wiring, and i'm pretty sure there's a DLC at the end of my road. when i've lost the phone line, only a couple times, adt never sent a cop, and never mentioned it later. they did though figure out i had low battery issues and such, but i assumed thats done in some regular service comm call stage.
heck, even the phone company can't figure out when my phone line is dead. or maybe they just didnt care.

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aswath 12/5/2012 | 3:15:29 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? Msg. 2
Skype already has 109M users according to their web site.

A minor correction. Number of that order is the count of downloads and not users. They also use different metrics, used when it is advantageous: registered users (many grant that they have registered multiple identities), concurrent users (many agree that they establish a session and leave it on without actively being involved in a conversation) and SkypeOut users (many account is inactive for six months and forfeit the balance).

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zher 12/5/2012 | 3:15:27 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? How long is the ATA/MTA able to last using the battery?

Sometimes there could be 2 or 3 days power outage in my area due to the hurricane, how come the current voip residential service deals with this?

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alchemy 12/5/2012 | 3:15:27 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? The issues I'm aware of with alarm systems & VoIP:

The alarm system typically sits between the telco demarcation point and the phones in the house. The alarm system has a relay that takes over the pair from the telco. If you hook up VoIP by disconnecting from the telco and plugging an RJ-11 into a phone jack, you end up being on the wrong side of that relay. Cable operators installing PacketCable typically always ask if there's an alarm system and do the right thing.

Alarm systems are always monitoring the telco line looking for battery. When battery is removed for some period of time (there's a standard for this for fire alarms), the alarm goes off. With VoIP, any time the power goes out, battery goes away and the alarm goes off. Cable operators put an 8-hour battery in their VoIP terminal adapter to solve this issue.

Alarm systems use all kinds of strange signalling. Some use home-brew modems. Some use simple pulses of a single frequency tone. It's all over the map. If you have a compression codec on your VoIP device, a lot of these don't work right.

The code for commercial fire alarms is that you need to have redundant telco lines that are physically seperated by some distance (10 feet?). The alarm system makes test calls on both telco lines periodically. If one of the lines fails (or if there's only 1 line), the test call rate increases to something crazy like once every 5 minutes. With VoIP, it's tough to provide this redundant path capability.

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ironman 12/5/2012 | 3:15:25 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? ItGÇÖs silly to think one can "run a 50v trapezoidal wave down fiber". TelcoGÇÖs or no one would attempt it. Fiber is more suited for photons or pulses of light energy.

BTW I didnGÇÖt think you meant to say it that way, it just struck me as strange not to comment.

IM

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alchemy 12/5/2012 | 3:15:25 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? zher writes:
How long is the ATA/MTA able to last using the battery?

Sometimes there could be 2 or 3 days power outage in my area due to the hurricane, how come the current voip residential service deals with this?

Battery life of the MTAs that are being deployed by the cable operators is between 8 and 12 hours. After that, you're out of luck.

There was a big debate over whether to line power or battery power the MTAs. For example, my legacy cable telephony service runs off a line-powered Tellabs RSU that's bolted to the side of my house. The HFC plant has power in it to drive all those RF amplifiers but it would be a huge expense to upgrade the power to drive millions of line-powered MTAs and provide the generators and/or massive batteries to back up the power. Economics ended up winning out. When the telcos replace copper with fiber, they'll have the exact same set of issues and it's obviously much easier to run a 50v trapezoidal wave down COAX than down fiber.

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materialgirl 12/5/2012 | 3:15:25 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? Yes, these types of VoIP are different. However, how can you consider them in isolation since a level of intermodal competition even between them will exist? The most virulent strain of VoIP is the one that will most effect the legacy world, not the most convenient. That is the one that will also grow the fastest. This is the one that wins. The patient here has AIDS.

Just to look at "Layer 4 VoIP", or what ever you want to call the telco provided VoIP, versus the "parasitic" (what I would call Layer 7 VoIP), therefore avoids half the issue, perhaps the most important half.

To me the only meaningful question is how fast circuit switched voice goes away, and into what type of VoIP, using what economic model. It seems like you need to look at access type (wireless versus POTS versus broadband versus wholly owned corporate VoIP networks taken off the PSTN versus Layer 7 straight through your PC), and trunking type (the Level3 business model versus some end-to-end arrangement), see how each is growing and why, then look at that impact on the broader ecosystem.

That will keep you busy for a weekend!

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alchemy 12/5/2012 | 3:15:24 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? ironman wrote:
ItGÇÖs silly to think one can "run a 50v trapezoidal wave down fiber". TelcoGÇÖs or no one would attempt it. Fiber is more suited for photons or pulses of light energy.

BTW I didnGÇÖt think you meant to say it that way, it just struck me as strange not to comment.

Yep. I guess sarcasm doesn't translate well to text. Running power down a fiber is obviously a *cough* rather challenging *cough* engineering problem.

The point, of course, is that the MSOs have the ability to power their MTAs from the line (even though it's costly to do so). The telcos, as they migrate to fiber, don't have that option. Personally, I think battery-backed MTAs are the wrong choice for primary line service but I'm not a CFO for a cable operator who has to pay for it.

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fgoldstein 12/5/2012 | 3:15:23 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? materialgirl, I am afraid I could keep busy all weekend trying to decipher your point. But I'll try to decipher some of it.

You suggest that I shouldn't consider different types of VoIP in isolation... but then these are entirely different business models, different technical architectures, and share little except a bit of sometimes-gratuitous, sometimes-compressed-away IP encapsulation. In my FCC VoIP Docket comments I described a whole bunch of different types of "VoIP" and challenged them to find a regulatory bright line betweenst them and between them and conventional telephony. Your model seems to be like focusing on green-eyed people, or businesses incorporated in New Jersey, or exaggerating some other trivial characteristic. Merely being "VoIP" is a trivial characteristic.

Right now VoIP is growing for a few reasons:

- Arbitrage. Vonage (VoN arbitrAGE) pays less than others to terminate LD calls. Fair?

- Systems. For the past eight years or so, the bulk of voice equipment development has followed Wall Street's Conventional Wisdom into VoIP, thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. VoIP gear is sometimes cheaper to buy than internally-simpler TDM.

- Industrial policy. Junior Powell, as demented Chair of the FCC, used the weight of his office to promote VoIP as well as his friends the arbitrageurs, while fighting competitive suppliers of TDM and ATM tooth and nail. VoIP was his excuse to flout the Telecom Act.

- Hype. You never get fired for buying IBM, and you never get fired for *investigating* VoIP for your company's use. But smart telecom guys don't throw out TDM, since it works better. They play with VoIP, blab loudly to the press (which buys points with Old Pointy upstairs), and do pilots forever.

- Perception. The public perceives VoIP as a bargain, so people pay $25/month for what boils down to a flat-rate LD plan, even when they make only a few hundred minutes a month of calls, and can get a cheaper or comparable deal, for their volume at least, using TDM, if they shop around. Plus VoIP is perceived as k3wl, kinda like having "dotcom" in your name in 1997. "Ooh, lookie, I have a web site, I'm 31337!" Similar idea.

On a level playing field, VoIP would take its niche, ATM would take its niche, and TDM would take its niche -- probably the largest.

And there's some really cool SONET stuff out there now too.

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alchemy 12/5/2012 | 3:15:22 AM

re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? fgoldstein writes:
Right now VoIP is growing for a few reasons:

- Arbitrage. Vonage (VoN arbitrAGE) pays less than others to terminate LD calls. Fair?

Agreed.

You neglect universal service and other federal taxes. You also neglect state taxes that finance 911 tandems and the equipment and personnel at the answering points. Wonderful public policy that lets rich people avoid paying taxes since they have high capacity broadband connections.

There's also the IXC arbritrage play that's driving all the IXCs to call their payload "data" on IP networks to screw the ILECs out of money.

- Systems. For the past eight years or so, the bulk of voice equipment development has followed Wall Street's Conventional Wisdom into VoIP, thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. VoIP gear is sometimes cheaper to buy than internally-simpler TDM.

And, of course, many of those systems don't work all that well. It's amazing how IP guys screw up telephony features on SIP phones. It'll be another decade before they're done re-inventing telephony to the point where it's all functional. IP guys have never heard of five 9's since their model for up time is a Cisco router. It's often cheaper because that's the only way you'd ever convince someone to buy it.

- Industrial policy. Junior Powell, as demented Chair of the FCC, used the weight of his office to promote VoIP as well as his friends the arbitrageurs, while fighting competitive suppliers of TDM and ATM tooth and nail. VoIP was his excuse to flout the Telecom Act.

Personally, I think that as the ILECs get into financial trouble and start shedding workers, this is going to change. Maybe not in a Dubya White House but the election is on the horizon.

- Hype. You never get fired for buying IBM, and you never get fired for *investigating* VoIP for your company's use. But smart telecom guys don't throw out TDM, since it works better. They play with VoIP, blab loudly to the press (which buys points with Old Pointy upstairs), and do pilots forever.

Well... it's not all hype. PacketCable VoIP works well enough and is adding subscribers at an impressive rate. Time-Warner has total subscriber numbers that are very similar to Vonage and their telephony subscribers cut down on churn on video and cable modem services. It's not unreasonable to expect 2 million PacketCable subs in the next 12 months. 5 years from now, you'd expect that half of the ILEC residential business will be lost to the MSOs and wireless. The 3GPP IMS stuff is also getting much more stable. Pieces of the technology are already being used as feature servers for things like push to talk on older networks.

The difference, of course, is that PacketCable and IMS are purpose-built systems that were (mostly) designed with a carrier-class mentality. They have good QoS. It varies from vendor to vendor but redundancy models, or at least availability models, are quite good. They have enough paranoia in them that they're not so vunerable to theft of service, denial of service, and attacks. Services tend to be provided by the core and aren't fully distributed to the client device. A TDM guy can look at the architectures and not feel ill. You can't say the same for many of the fully distributed SIP implementations.

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